Victor Hugo describes the decaying elephant monument at the Place de la Bastille in “Les Misérables”

Foreigners rarely inspected this structure, and passers-by did not look at it at all. The Elephant was crumbling with every year; fallen chunks of plaster left hideous sores on its flanks. The "aediles", as the elegant argot of the salons puts it, had forgotten it since 1814. It stood there in its corner, gloomy, ailing, decaying, ringed by a rotted fence, befouled by drunken coachmen; cracks furrowed its belly, an iron rod of its framework jutted from its tail, tall grass grew between its legs. Since the level of the square had been rising around it for thirty years, through that slow and ceaseless layering of earth which imperceptibly raises the ground of great cities, it found itself in a hollow, as though the earth had settled beneath it. It stood soiled, unacknowledged, repellent and haughty: ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, sad in the eyes of the thinker. It somehow recalled a heap of rubbish that would soon be swept away, and at once something full of grandeur that would soon be dethroned.

Victor Hugo, in Les Misérables, on the monument in the Place de la Bastille.